Can Unrivaled stop WNBA players being forced to make their money abroad? – The Guardian

Brittney Griner’s ordeal in a Russian prison highlighted the risks of pursuing a basketball career overseas. A new league hopes to solve the problem
Candace Parker spent the prime of her career as most WNBA players do, rushing back and forth across the United States during the league’s season while representing her country in international competition and playing club basketball overseas during the offseason, supplementing her domestic income with significantly higher paydays in Russia, China and Turkey.
Until she didn’t. Parker signed a lucrative TV broadcasting deal with Turner Sports in 2018 as an analyst and commentator for NBA games, allowing her to stop playing overseas and to even take a pay cut to join the reigning champion Las Vegas Aces last offseason. Parker made a reported $7m in off-court earnings alone in 2022 by leveraging her charismatic personality and platform as one of the greatest hoopers of all time.
The question is: how can other WNBA players do the same? Rather than following the prescribed path that has been set out for them from the WNBA to national team responsibilities to overseas play – all at the expense of a family life or sense of safety and security – how can they choose their own destiny?
The WNBA has more sponsors, primetime TV deals, higher salaries and better benefits than ever before. But 67 of the league’s 144 players still took the risk of playing overseas last offseason despite Brittney Griner’s detainment in a Russian prison. Alternatively, some join the WNBA Player Marketing Agreement, forgoing play to help promote the league through public appearances.
A new professional women’s basketball league is hoping to provide another option by giving the best WNBA players an opportunity to play in the United States during the offseason. Unrivaled, the brainchild of WNBA All-Stars Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart, will pit 30 of the world’s best players against each other in three-on-three and one-on-one action starting this January in Miami.
“I think [Unrivaled] is just continuing to make sure that people have opportunities and options to stay home,” Stewart told the Guardian during WNBA All-Star weekend in Las Vegas. “So it’s just the ability to kind of give players more options and more choices because I think the prioritization really didn’t give us any choices. Now we’re taking them back and it’s just coming in from a different source.”
But Unrivaled is also a part of a much larger movement to grow women’s sports by highlighting the talent and personalities of individual players. The goal is to get the best WNBA players more exposure and better branding and partnership opportunities.
After all, no matter how popular a player might be for six months of the year during the WNBA season, the current state of women’s basketball leads to prolonged “blackout” periods when players go overseas, and miss out on their chance to market themselves to an American audience.
This landscape leads WNBA players to become “out of sight, out of mind” during the offseason, as nine-year veteran and Las Vegas Aces All-Star Chelsea Gray put it. “So being able to be home and our faces and our images and appearance, we’re able to go there. But overseas is where we make our bread. That’s where it’s always been at least since I’ve been in the league. My rookie year they were just like: ‘You need to go overseas.’ … But it didn’t allow for the growth off the court as much as far as brand-wise, and seeing our face.”
Atlanta Dream All-Star forward Cheyenne Parker agrees. “[Playing overseas] is not easy,” she said. “I’ve been over there every season in between WNBA seasons and I have no endorsements right now. So that that kind of shows the disconnect there. It’s hard. It’s hard because you’re in another country. So you kind of – you become irrelevant.”
Unrivaled hopes to change that by giving athletes a platform to showcase themselves year-round in the US. By taking advantage of social media and documentary-style storytelling, the league will show off the unique personalities of players and put their names and faces out there for the world to see and hopefully become invested in.
“A huge focus is content,” Collier explained. “So we’re gonna have like a ton of behind the scenes stuff, we’re gonna have podcasts, we’re gonna have cameras everywhere all the time kind of thing. So it’s gonna be like a lot of cool access to players that you don’t necessarily get to see very often.”
The flashy style of 3×3 basketball will also hopefully help the league.
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“That’s why we think it’s gonna be so entertaining is because it’s gonna be so offensive,” Collier said about the playing style of Unrivaled. “And so I think players are really going to be able to grow their game and show the skills that they have, and so I think it’d be really entertaining for the fans.”
The idea is that Unrivaled will be parallel to the WNBA. Collier and Stewart have already had positive conversations with WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert about cross-promotion, similar to how the WNBA aired Athletes Unlimited games on its League Pass platform at no extra cost last winter.
“Hopefully, Unrivaled and the WNBA can continue to do that where we can really kind of encourage one another,” Stewart said. “During the WNBA season like right now, we’ll talk about the potential and possibility of Unrivaled. And then when the Unrivaled season is going on it’s like, yeah, look at this player who’s killing people in one-on-one, or this team in three-on-three, and where can you find them in the WNBA? You might not be in Miami to be able to watch [Unrivaled], but you might be in Chicago and you can come and watch them when [their WNBA] team comes to play there.”
After all, a huge part of the NBA’s success in recent years has been branding its stars and allowing fans to follow their favorite players from team to team as the league reshuffles its deck every offseason. While the WNBA doesn’t project to have quite as much player movement any time soon, the league is trending in that direction. And it can’t hurt to have the world’s best players earn more name recognition and fandom as a result of increased exposure during the WNBA offseason.
In fact, it could eventually help turn women’s basketball into a year-round product as men’s basketball currently is in the United States, where following the on and off court moves of star players has become a sport in itself for many fans.
For now, though, the immediate goal of Unrivaled is to allow WNBA players to avoid the risks and downsides of going overseas every offseason.
“I think now you’re seeing the growth of women’s sports, the potential of more women’s sports on TV than ever, it’s realizing that you have to be home and be reachable and be able to kind of use [our] platforms in the United States,” Stewart said. “So it’s a two-way street. It’s like, yes, you wont get all these opportunities to be overseas. [But you are] staying home to build something here.”

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